A data storage system is an arrangement of hardware and software that typically includes one or more storage processors coupled to an array of non-volatile data storage devices, such as magnetic disk drives, electronic flash drives, and/or optical drives. The storage processors service host input/output (I/O) operations received from host machines. The received I/O operations specify storage objects (e.g. logical disks or “LUNs”) that are to be written to, read from, created, or deleted. The storage processors run software that manages incoming I/O operations and that performs various data processing tasks to organize and secure the host data received from the host machines and stored on the non-volatile data storage devices
Some data storage systems employ read caching to perform read I/O operations in a faster manner. When a data block is requested to be read from a storage object, the data storage system may read several additional blocks that logically follow the requested block in the storage object and store them in a cache portion of memory. Storage systems often read data sequentially, in order of logical address. If consecutive read requests are directed to cached blocks, then such read requests may be fulfilled directly from memory, improving performance.